Doom Roguelike Equipment Analysis: Boots (Also Fluid mechanics)

The base sprite for all Boots except Steel Boots. (Prior to 0.9.9.8, anyway)

But before we start on Boots, we really have to discuss fluids, as a significant portion of Boot functionality is tied to fluid mechanics.

Water

Does no damage, enemies don't avoid it, causes corpses to vanish.

Your primary introduction to fluids, Water is easy to dismiss as purely decorative, as the game doesn't call your attention to things like corpses being eaten by water (And it's pretty mystifying if we're trying to think realistically; the water is so shallow you can wade through it effortlessly, but so deep that bodies disappear underwater?), and there's enough ways for a body to fail to generate that a learning player may simply assume randomness. (Including gibbing existing and being notably random in practice)

And honestly, unless you play on Nightmare! or in Angel of Darkness, water tends to basically be decorative, as bodies don't matter outside those cases unless Archviles are running about. Due to how the game organizes itself, you'll only rarely see water on a map containing an Archvile -it can happen, but it's perfectly normal for a full standard run to never have it happen, since normal water generation has mostly stopped by the time Archviles are allowed to spawn.

That said, water does matter even outside those situations by virtue of fluids competing. A switch that fills a room -or the map!- with water will overwrite all the Acid and Lava tiles with water tiles, which can be helpful if wading through Acid or Lava would otherwise be necessary to reach something of interest. It's too bad there's no water barrels to use this more dynamically; that would be pretty cool of a mechanic.

Also, if you're fond of pushing barrels, note that you're inexplicably barred from shoving barrels into water tiles, where the barrel will simply refuse to move. This is specific to water: if you try to shove a barrel into Acid or Lava, the barrel is shoved in and detonates. I'm not a fan of this particular combination of mechanics.

If you are playing on Nightmare! and/or Angel of Darkness, Water becomes extremely important to pay attention to, as the spontaneous revival mechanic that those both use does require an intact corpse. Thus, trying to arrange enemies to die on a Water tile can save you a lot of trouble -or if you want to harvest an enemy's ammo drop repeatedly, you'll need to make sure they don't die on a Water tile.

Mostly, though, Water acts as an intro to the idea of fluids. It's okay at this job, though it could probably be better at it.

Acid

6 Acid-typed damage per action to units standing in it, many enemies avoid wading through it, causes corpses to vanish. (On I'm Too Young To Die, does 3 damage)

The first fluid to matter fairly consistently; you don't want to walk through it or be knocked into it, and (most) enemies will endeavor to avoid sizzling to death themselves. More precisely, enemies fall into three categories:

1: Unaffected by and ignores Acid. This is flying enemies, primarily, but boss enemies are normally immune even if they lack a narrative/aesthetic justification for said immunity. (Though in a standard run this is usually irrelevant to several of them, only potentially coming up via the Napalm Launcher or Acid Spitter) 0.9.9.8 also added all Nightmare enemies to this category for some reason. I should also point out that Elite Former Commandos -but not the other three elite zombie types- are in this category, which is really jarring in 0.9.9.7, and is a little awkward in 0.9.9.8 given the patch notes are so vague on the 'Nightmare enemies are now less susceptible to fluids' notion; I imagine some people playing 0.9.9.8 saw an Elite Former Commando wade through hostile fluids and so figured that the patch notes were lumping together 'Nightmare' and 'Elite' enemies, not realizing that Elite Former Commandos already had this immunity.

2: Affected by Acid and scared of it. (By which I mean unwilling to enter Acid and always trying to get out if they end up on a tile containing Acid) This is the majority of grounded enemies.

3: Affected by Acid but heedless of the harm it causes. This is pinkie Demons; they tend to not wander through Acid if they're just milling about, but if they've spotted Doomguy they will charge right through Acid with no regard to the danger. Pinkie Demons can easily die to even fairly brief stretches of Acid; walking through 4 tiles will leave them with only 1 HP, and 5 will kill them all on its own. (In 0.9.9.7, Nightmare pinkies were also in this category)

In 0.9.9.7, there was a fourth category: unaffected by Acid but is terrified of it anyway. This was Archviles, Nightmare Archviles, and the Arena Master. They would literally freeze in place if you managed to knock them into a 3x3 or larger patch of Acid and/or Lava. I assume this was an oversight, where Archviles were always meant to get the full immunity package but historically they forgot to modify the AI part appropriately.

An important oddity is that Acid tiles do damage per-action. This is not obvious in play and has several unintuitive implications, where for example a Technician cramming Medpacks down their throat dies just as fast to Acid as a Scout even though the Technician spends only 0.1 seconds on using a Medpack. This has a particularly frustrating interaction with Running, in that Running halves the damage taken from hostile fluids on the ground, but Running ends early if you use most healing effects, and so if you're Running through Acid and use a Medpack, you'll heal and immediately take 6 damage instead of the 3 damage you'd have taken if you'd not healed. As a Small Medpack heals 25% of your HP and 25% of base HP is 12.5, this makes Small Medpacks pretty ineffectual at healing while standing in Acid unless you have significant Protection and/or Acid resistance.

This particular interaction is odd because it's inconsistent with how the game normally handles damage from fluids: Running and Envirosuit Packs are both protective against fluid damage on both the turn you start them up and the turn they time out on. Unless your Running stopped from healing yourself. That's... bizarre.

Note that Running reducing fluid damage occurs before the game processes other modifiers. 2 Protection on your feet will knock Acid to 4 damage when not Running but knock it down to 1 damage when Running. Also note that fluid damage sticks to the usual rule that damage reduction cannot knock damage to 0 except by virtue of a 100% resistance being involved. Fluid damage is in fact the most common time 100% resistance comes up: the game is much more willing to pass out 100% resistance on the feet than on the body.

Lava

12 Fire-typed damage an action to units standing in it, many enemies avoid wading through it, causes corpses to vanish. (On I'm Too Young To Die, does 6 damage)

Meaner Acid, basically.

Notably, even though the game could support an enemy that's immune to Acid or Lava while still being susceptible to the other fluid, that's just not a thing; everything I laid out in the list of 'enemy interactions with Acid' applies to Lava. (Aside of course that Lava will kill susceptible enemies faster)

For the player, the potential to be immune to only one fluid at a given moment actually is realized. The Lava Boots Assembly gives Lava immunity but not Acid immunity, for example, and Acid-Proof Boots are the reverse.

Lava itself is absurdly lethal. Small Medpacks are useless to use if you have no foot protection at all, and non-Marines by default die in 5 actions. (Before 0.9.9.8, Marines died in 5 actions too, but their new energy resistance extends to the feet: Marines thus only take 9 damage from Lava by default, and with their 60 HP this means it takes 7 actions for Lava to kill a Marine by itself) It's extremely important to get out of Lava as fast as possible if you aren't immune or at least heavily protected. Do note that Tough as Nails applies to fluid damage: Tough as Nails 5 is adequate to make Running through Lava barefoot as safe as you can get without overt immunity.

Also, I should explicitly emphasize that Lava damage, just like Acid on the floor, is based on taking actions, not on time passing. Among other points, if you're two tiles away from dry land, there may be no point to Running: you'll halve damage and be hurt, then be hurt again when you walk into the next tile, vs if you'd walked you'd take damage once. Without Protection on your feet, those both work out to 12 damage.

It's also worth pointing out that a non-obvious implication of this action-based quality is that when susceptible enemies end up on hostile fluids, you should check if they're low on HP before trying to pour more damage into them. Smacking a Baron of Hell standing in Lava may be a waste of time if they were going to die the next time they got a turn, as fluid damage occurs when a unit's turn starts, and so if fluid damage kills a unit it does so without giving them a chance to act. Exacerbating this point is that susceptible enemies hate to stand in hostile fluids: if a susceptible enemy can walk into a safe patch of ground with one move, they will almost always do that instead of attacking Doomguy. (Unless Doomguy is in melee range with them: 'attack Doomguy if he's in melee range' is the top priority of most enemy types) Do note that if they are completely surrounded by hostile fluids, they'll reliably attack: enemies who avoid fluid tiles will never enter them of their own accord, not even if that's the only way to get to safe ground. Conversely, if you get such an enemy stuck in the middle of hostile fluids, you can just walk away, confident they'll melt without any need for you to do anything further.

I should also point out that enemy resistances are all 'universal', which is to say that Acid resistance and Fire resistance on enemies do in fact protect them from Acid and Fire on the ground. This isn't strongly relevant overall as not many enemies have either of those resistances, and furthermore eg the Bruiser Brothers do have Acid resistance but are flatly immune to hostile fluids and so for them this point is irrelevant, but there are four cases where it comes up: Imps and Revenants have Fire resistance (50% and 25%, respectively) while Hell Knights and Barons of Hell have Acid resistance. (50% each) Imps are particularly blatant about this, as their HP is exactly equal to Lava damage, but they will survive one turn of Lava damage. (On I'm Too Young To Die, they will in fact live for three turns)

I'm assuming enemy Protection also applies to enemy feet, but am less sure of this. Under that assumption, though, Revenants take 7 damage from Lava per action, and so take 5 turns to die to Lava alone. Hell Knights take 2 damage per turn from Acid, and so will take 25 turns to die to Acid alone. And Barons of Hell take 1 damage per turn from Acid, and so will take 60 turns to die to Acid alone: don't treat Hell Knights and Barons of Hell as out of the fight just because you shoved them onto Acid!

If you're fond of Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666, get used to seeing Lava a lot. Prior to 0.9.9.8, eventually the game's normal routine for fluids completely stopped generating non-Lava fluids. For an Angel of 100 run, more than 75% of your floors are going to be only generating Lava. (And for an Archangel of 666 run, it's literally like 98% of the run) A standard run ended before reaching this point, but it was still pretty normal for the last few floors to all be Lava-filled.

As of 0.9.9.8, water and Acid now make occasional appearances even very late in an Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 run, but... the above is still largely true.

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So that's the three types of fluids, but what about their generation?

Just as there are three types of fluid, there are three types of standard fluid generation routines, those being...

1: Fluid rooms. When the game generates a room, it may randomly decide the room is a 'fluid room', in which case the room will either be completely filled with a fluid, or the outer edge of the room will be regular floor and everything within that outline is filled with fluid. (In graphical mode, the latter scenario always has the outer ring of floor use the 'wood floor' graphic, though this has no mechanical impact) The type of fluid that the room is filled with is based on rolling a 10-sided die, then taking the current floor number, dividing that by 5 and adding the result to the die roll. If the final number is less than 5, the room will be filled with water. If the final number is anywhere from 5 to 9, it is filled with Acid, while 10 or higher results in Lava.

So at the beginning of a run, a fluid-filled room has a 50% chance to be filled with water, a 40% chance to be filled with Acid, and a 10% chance to be filled with Lava. Every fifth floor Doomguy descends shifts this all 'one step down'; at 5 floors in, a fluid-filled room is now a 40% chance to be water, a 40% chance to be filled with Acid, and a 20% chance to be filled with Lava. In a standard run the impact of this progression is small -the final regular floor is 23, which would be 10%/40%/50% for water/Acid/Lava- but in Angel of 100 and Angel of 666 runs it means such rooms eventually never generate with water (Starting from floor 25), and later are simply guaranteed to be filled with Lava. (Starting from floor 45, specifically)

2: Rivers. These are a solid wall of fluid crossing from one end of the map to the other. Rivers can be vertical or horizontal, but not (directly) diagonal, and different floor types have different rules on whether both are allowed or just one or the other. Maps that allow both river types by default prefer vertical rivers, generating vertical rivers 75% of the time.

When vertical rivers are rolled, there is a 2/3 chance it will be 1 river, a 1/4 chance it will be 2 rivers, and a 1/12 chance it will be three rivers. How wide the river(s) are is partially dependent on how many rivers rolled: if one river rolled, it will be 4-6 tiles wide. If two rivers rolled, they'll each be 3-5 tiles wide. And if three rivers rolled, they'll each be 2-4 tiles wide. So in short more rivers means less wide of rivers, on average. (In all cases, the game rolls a d3 and adds a number to the result to decide width, rolling for each river separately) Notably, this means that if you see a 6-wide vertical river you know it's the only one on the map, while seeing a 2-wide vertical river means there's two more rivers on the map.

When a horizontal river is chosen, it's always just the one river. Horizontal rivers are 2-4 tiles wide. (Again, the game rolls a d3 and adds 1 to the result, just like triple vertical rivers do)

Rivers always have a single 'bridge' placed somewhere along them. (In graphical mode, these bridges use wooden tiles, but this doesn't matter mechanically) These 'bridges' are 2 tiles wide in every case.

All rivers can meander: the game generates vertical rivers at the top of the map and each tile down has a 2/9 chance to randomly shift left or right by 1 tile. (Odds are equal for either direction) Horizontal rivers are a 1/9 chance to meander per step, and of course shift up or down when meandering. The game's floors are much wider than they are tall, however, so in spite of the odds of meandering being higher odds for vertical rivers than horizontal rivers, you'll see perfectly straight vertical rivers much more often than perfectly straight horizontal rivers. A given meandering roll is negated if a river attempts to meander into the map's outside walls, so rivers only replace outer wall tiles at their start and end points.

A river's fluid type is determined by rolling a die, adding the floor number to that die result, then comparing the result against a table. If the resulting number is 14 or less, the river is water. If it is 25 or more, the river is Lava. If it is 15-24, the river is Acid.

The size of the die is affected by difficulty: the die has a base amount of 6, but multiplied the difficulty internal number by 2 and added that to the die size, so I'm Too Young To Die rolls a d8, while Nightmare! rolls a d16.

This system's output means that rivers are unable to generate as water starting from floor 14, and unable to generate as Acid starting from floor 25, making Lava the default past those points, but with both being possible earlier, with higher difficulties making Acid and Lava able to appear sooner and on average making them show up more often, but not in a hard-and-fast way. (That is, an I'm Too Young To Die run rolling max on these numbers would see Acid and Lava sooner than a Nightmare! run that instead always rolled minimum)

3: 'Walks'. These are the random splotches of fluids you'll see here and there. The name is pretty indicative of the mechanic, in that a 'walk' is literally the game plopping a tile of fluid in a random location and then 'walking' it to a random adjacent tile (Or choosing to not move at all, with this equally likely as any direction), repeating a random number of times, to produce a fluid layout that is very unpredictable in size and shape. The details operate in four variations based on how deep the run is in a relatively straightforward way.

In the first five floors, 'walks' always produce water when they occur. The number of 'walks' is decided by rolling a 3-sided die and then subtracting 1 from it; thus, 1/3rd of the time no water is placed this way at all, 1/3rd of time one 'walk' occurs, and 1/3rd of the time two 'walks' occur. The 'walks' themselves roll a 40-sided die and then add 2 to it to determine how many times the 'walk'... walks. In theory this can produce 42 tiles of water, but this will basically never happen, as 'walks' are allowed to reenter tiles they already went into, effectively 'wasting' a step of fluid generation, in addition to having a 1/9 chance per step of explicitly wasting a step of fluid generation by refusing to move. Also, if a 'walk' attempts to traverse toward beyond the map's edges, it gets pushed back into the map, which is another way a 'walk' step can be wasted. So a given 'walk' is only guaranteed to generate a minimum of 1 fluid tile, not the three tiles you might expect.

In floors 6 through 10, the only thing that changes is that Acid is generated in place of water. 0-2 'walks' that are each 3-42 maximum steps 'walked'.

In floors 11 through 15, 'walks' change noticeably; firstly, they switch from Acid to Lava. Second, the number that generates is based on rolling a 5-sided die and then subtracting 1 from the result, meaning you have 0-4 'walks' now. Lastly, the maximum 'walk' length uses a 50-sided die and then adds 2 to the result, meaning a 'walk' is 3-52 maximum steps 'walked'. So 'walks' occur more consistently (Only a 20% chance of rolling 0 'walks', instead of a 33% chance), can be more numerous when they do occur, and individual 'walks' on average cover more ground. (Though you'll basically never see them even approach their theoretical maximum number of affected tiles, for the 'walk back into own trail' reason I've already explained)

Lastly, all floors past 15 still generate Lava, but the 'walks' become even more numerous; the 5-sided die is still rolled, but now instead of subtracting 1 from the result, 3 is added to it, turning the new range into 4-8 'walks' on any floor that uses the standard fluid generation rules. Curiously, the 'walk' length is actually reduced back down to rolling a 40-sided die and adding 2 to it, though in practice the fact that so many more 'walks' get to generate means you'll pretty consistently see more Lava scattered about such floors regardless.

0.9.9.8 made one tweak to this: once you're past floor 30, the game picks a random floor from 5 to 24 to treat as your current floor for 'walk' generation purposes. As such, all the prior routines can potentially be used. Do note that this means that water is still very rare (Only 1 in 25 floors that do 'walks' at all will generate water with them), and Acid isn't very common. (5 in 25 floors that do 'walks' will generate Acid with them) Also note that this is the only thing 0.9.9.8 did to reduce Lava generation in the late game of Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs: rivers and fluid rooms are still guaranteed to be Lava once you're deep enough.

Note that on a standard map, rivers and 'walks' are mutually exclusive: if you get a river, you don't get random spatters. You always get one of the two in a standard map, with the odds being split equally between the two possibilities.

Of course, that gets into the fact that the standard floor generation rules aren't always used. There's the obvious point that Special Levels and a few non-Special Level floors in a standard run have fixed designs. Less obvious is that when a floor generates, it rolls for a floor type, and every floor type has its own rules on how things work, including that several of them do in fact alter fluid generation rules.

First of all, the rare 'arena' floor type simply never generates rivers. Conversely, arena maps repeat the 'walk' routine 3 times, and so can still have quite a lot of fluid on the map, especially if the arena map rolls on floor 16 or later where it's no longer possible to roll 0 'walks'. (For reference, arenas are easily identified; the player always arrives in the center of the map, there's 4 regular stairs down, one per corner, and the map is largely empty space. They also have the odd, non-obvious property that every monster has a 50% chance of being placed in 'hunting mode'; each such enemy will always know exactly where Doomguy is at all times and attempt to advance toward him anytime he's not in vision)

'City' floors have standard 'walk' behavior, but a given city only has a 1 in 3 chance of generating a river at all, and if a river generates it must be vertical, not horizontal. Cities also actually decide river generation before any rooms are placed, and so when rivers generate there tends to be fewer rooms on the map and the rooms won't be 'pierced' by rivers. (City floors are easy to mistake for normal floors when you're inexperienced, but their rooms are always 'freefloating'; they can't touch each other, and they can't touch the edges of the map)

'Warehouse' floors use the standard 'walk' behavior, except that if any rivers generate then no 'walks' are allowed to occur, just like in the normal map generation routine. Only 1 in 6 warehouse maps has a river at all, however. (Warehouse floors are one of the more distinctive map types, being made of three large rooms that have box tiles eating up a lot of space. Said boxes are also much more durable than boxes found on other floor types)

Single-monster floors completely block river generation, but use standard 'walk' rules. (As the name suggests, single-monster floors have only a single monster type generate on a given such floor. Well, mostly. Several variants actually used mixed monster generation, such as a 50/50 split between Hell Knights and Barons of Hell)

Cave floors use more or less standard 'walk' rules, I think. The wiki is pretty unclear, making it sound like the 'walks' themselves are normal but then affect floor generation, but it doesn't explain how. Regardless, rivers only occur in 1 in 3 cave floors, and when they do occur they're less biased toward being vertical; 1 in 3 caves with rivers will have the river be horizontal. (As opposed to the usual 1 in 4 river-including floors) Furthermore, a cave that selects vertical rivers only gets a single vertical river (Instead of up to three), and has a more restricted range on where the river can be placed; instead of adding 19 to the result of rolling a 40-sided die to decide how far to the right the river's start is placed (As normally happens when a single river generates) they add 33 to the result of rolling a 16-sided die. Cave floors are easily identified in graphics mode, as there's a cave-looking tileset just for them. Even without graphics, they're pretty obvious, being largely open spaces with few or no proper rooms, and walls generally being jagged (By virtue of running diagonally, for one) instead of being clean rectangles.

'Small rooms' floors are standard, aside that only 1 in 4 such floors will perform river generation. ('Small rooms' are made of many small, interconnected rooms. They're usually pretty distinctive, but sometimes a normal map will generate such that your initial exploration appears to be a 'small rooms' map, and by a similar token you might explore two or three rooms in a 'small rooms' floor before you become confident it's not a regular floor)

'Maze' floors are standard, aside that 2 in 3 of them perform river generation, making them the floor type you see rivers on most often overall. (These are really obvious: they always open with a "Where the Hell is the way out of here?!" message)

I'm pretty sure the above is excluding a map type, as starting in Hell there's a map type made of a few large rooms and many small bridges through lots of Lava, but as far as I'm aware that map type doesn't use the fluid generation rules per se so...

It should be emphasized that aside rivers in city maps (And 'possibly 'walks' in cave maps?), fluids are normally placed after rooms are defined, and will overwrite walls and whatnot. As such, they can open paths into rooms and even 'eat' entire smaller rooms at times, and in general can produce some very odd-looking maps if they intersect with the right terrain features. Particularly wonky is when a bridge is placed so a room's wall is overlapping the bridge; this is one of two main ways for the game to generate such that you can't safely walk from anywhere to anywhere, even on a very early map, because the wall will still spawn rather than the bridge 'overwriting' it. (The other main way is for a room to roll as a 'fluid room', and specifically the kind that lacks a walkable outer ring)

I should also note that there are two big qualifiers to fluid generation rules: first, a rare event is Hell Has Frozen Over, which overrules all fluid type rules, forcing initial fluids to all be water. As this event only starts occurring once you're late enough that water is a rarity, the contrast is pretty stark! Second, Levers can flood a room (Or the map!) with a fluid, and Levers don't care about the fluid generation rules: a Lava-flooding Lever is just as likely as a water-flooding Lever at every stage of the game.

With all that out of the way, on to Boots!

Steel Boots

Protection: 1

Damage Resistances: None.

Knockback Modification: -10%.

Move Modification: None.

Special: None.

Minimum floor: 4

On their own, Steel Boots are pretty clearly the worst Boots, only worth wearing until you have Plasteel or Protective Boots. That 1 Protection is barely enough to make it not too horrible to Run across patches of Acid (It shaves the damage when Running from 3 to 2), and that's really about it.

In practice, the fact that Steel Boots are the only legal base for the Tactical Boots Assembly means you'll tend to wear them a lot anyway, as Tactical Boots are amazing (No matter your build) and the Boots that are better than them are all quite rare.

For reference, the left sprite is the original sprite, while the right sprite is the 0.9.9.8 sprite. That's true of all the Boots in this page. (Except the Uniques, where I don't yet have their 0.9.9.8 graphics grabbed)

Protective Boots

Protection: 2

Damage Resistances: 25% Acid

Knockback Modification: -25%

Move Modification: None.

Special: None.

Minimum floor: 7

Between the resistance and Protection, Protective Boots make it tolerable to consider wading through Acid, knocking the damage down to 2 per action. You're still better off Running, but less so. 2 Protection is also enough that Running across Lava is something you can get away with, though it's still going to hurt. (You'll take 4 damage per action from Lava, specifically... unless you're a Marine)

If you're not Assembling Tactical Boots, these are a clean upgrade over Steel Boots.

Plasteel Boots

Protection: 2

Damage Resistances: 50% Acid, 25% Fire

Knockback Modification: -50%

Move Modification: None.

Special: None

Minimum floor: 11

Passively brings you down to 1 damage from Acid, making Running pointless when wading through Acid. The Fire resistance means Running across Lava is actually tolerable (You'll take 2 damage per action), though don't think you can get away with just walking through Lava as anything except a desperate necessity. (You'll take 7 damage per action if not a Marine, which kills a non-Marine in 8 actions from full HP. A Marine takes 6 and so will die in 10 actions instead)

The generically best of the basic boots if you're not Assembling Tactical Boots.

They're especially worth considering if you're playing a Blademaster Scout or Malicious Blades Technician and are worried about knockback interfering with your ability to close on enemies like Revenants, since you can't take Badass with those Masteries.

Acid-Proof Boots

Protection: 0

Damage Resistances: 100% Acid

Knockback Modification: None.

Move Modification: None.

Special: None.

Minimum floor: 8

The main flaw with Acid-Proof Boots is that they're normally not allowed to show up until floor 8, and the deeper you get into a run, the more the game shifts over to fluid generation producing Lava. If you get it really early, such as from a vault, it can be much-appreciated as something you carry around and switch into when Acid is in your way, but ultimately it becomes completely irrelevant unless you find -and insist on using- the Acid Spitter as well. No enemy can convert tiles to Acid, period, further limiting their utility.

That said, they make a decent base for Lava Boots if you can spare the Onyx Mod Pack, and they're also the only boots that provide Acid immunity without either penalizing movement speed or reducing knockback resistance. It's not like they're worthless, just... frustratingly likely to spawn too late to matter.

Gothic Boots

Protection: 10

Damage Resistances: None.

Knockback Modification: -70%

Move Modification: -15%

Special: Has 200% max Durability. If worn alongside Gothic Armor, the player will be completely unable to move, but all their resistances are raised by 40%.

Minimum floor: 10

1 damage per action from Acid and 2 damage per action from Lava, with extended durability substantially delaying the point at which Protection starts rotting. Gothic Boots are thus an okay option for letting you wade through Lava in a pinch, though not something you should rely on if you can avoid it. You only have a base of 50 HP, after all: wading through 5 tiles of Lava is still 20% of your HP gone even with Gothic Boots on. (Unless you're a Marine, in which case you're only taking 1 damage and have 60 HP, so 5 tiles of walking is just over 8% of your HP gone)

It's too bad Plasteel Boots give an only slightly weaker degree of knockback protection while not penalizing movement speed any: Gothic Boots are a bit difficult to justify using specifically for knockback resistance as a result.

I've already been over the set bonus with Gothic Armor and won't reiterate it here.

Phaseshift Boots

Protection: 4

Damage Resistances: None.

Knockback Modification: +20%.

Move Modification: +15%.

Special: If worn alongside Phaseshift Armor, renders the player immune to Acid and Lava on the floor.

Minimum floor: 8

2 damage per action from Acid (1 if Running), and 2 damage per action from Lava if Running. Marines are especially likely to appreciate the Phaseshift Boots thanks to the ease of grabbing Badass ranks helping minimize the problems from the reduced resistance to knockback. 0.9.9.8 giving Marines energy resistances makes it even better for them; 1 damage per action from Acid without needing to run, and only 1 damage from Lava if running!

Really darn good if you also get Phaseshift Armor, of course.

Enviroboots

Protection: 0

Damage Resistances: 100% Acid and Fire

Knockback Modification: -50%

Move Modification: -25%

Special: None.

Minimum floor: 10

Permanently solves your problems with crossing Acid and Lava rivers, and with a slightly lower movement penalty than Cerberus Boots. (Albeit also a lesser degree of knockback resistance)

Straightforwardly good, and thankfully is a Unique that isn't struggling to compete with non-Uniques.

Nyarlaptotep's Boots

Protection: 6

Damage Resistances: 30% Acid and Fire

Knockback Modification: None.

Move Modification: +20%

Special: Regenerates 5 points of Durability per action if the player hasn't taken damage for at least 10 actions in a row. If worn alongside Malek's Armor, renders the player completely impervious to all sources of Fire damage.

Minimum floor: 15

The best boots in the game by a wide margin.

This is true even if you don't have Malek's Armor, by the way. The set bonus is really nice, but even without it these are boots you should basically always weld to your feet if you're lucky enough to find them. A swap for letting you wade through Lava without harm is worth holding onto if you don't have Malek's Armor, but most boots are obsolete if you have these.

0.9.9.8 made this slightly less true, as it lowered the movement bonus from 25% to 20%: in 0.9.9.7, Nyarlaptotep's Boots were as fast as Tactical Boots that had an Agility Mod attached! Now Nyarlaptotep's Boots are slightly slower, and so if you don't have Malek's Armor you may prefer to stick to Tactical Boots for most situations. But this is a small enough change there's a fair argument it's better to run Nyarlaptotep's Boots, especially if you're not playing a Marine: a Marine's easy access to Badass means they rarely have to worry about being knocked into Acid or Lava, where Scouts have to forgo a Mastery to get Badass and Technicians can't necessarily take Badass. (And might struggle to fit it in even when it's legal) Having hyper-fast boots that also knock Acid damage to 1 and Lava damage to 2 is very appreciated when being pingponged about by Mancubi.

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Unfortunately, Boot design is one of Doom Roguelike' biggest areas of weakness. Boots don't have much potential for true variety, as they're only allowed to do the following three things:

1: Reduce damage from fluids on the ground. (Via Protection and Acid/Fire resistance)

2: Modify knockback.

3: Modify Doomguy's movement speed.

Which isn't a strong basis for providing significant Boot variety. If Boots could do things like improve Doomguy's fire speed ("These Boots make you stable!") or Accuracy ("The stable Boots make it easier to land shots!"), there'd be more potential for meaningfully divergent Boots, but it's just the prior three things, so...

Exacerbating this is the nature of fluid distribution and all. The overwhelming default is for Doomguy to not care about protection from the ground in combat conditions: you kill things, then you swap in your Boots that make crossing an Acid river safe(r). As such, mostly you end up with two Boots: your running Boots for general-purpose speed advantage, and your swap that you break out when you need to get across fluids safely. Which exacerbates the issue: you're not very likely to carry around a third pair of Boots that's mediocre at speed and mediocre at protecting you from fluids, because you rarely need both qualities at the same time such that compromising on one to get some of the other is beneficial.

It's thus no surprise that Jupiter Hell did away with Boots entirely, replacing them with Helmets that get to do things like boost your effective range. I hope Doom Roguelike itself manages to actually salvage Boot design, but I totally get why Jupiter Hell just gave up on the idea!

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Next time, we cover the basics of Mod Packs.

See you then.